RF air interfaces and front-ends (RF waveforms, symbols, frame structures, antenna arrays through to demodulators) are the Achilles tendon of mobile nodes passing through or situated in electronically contested volumes. RF spectrum is flooded with sensor/autonomous systems and communications nodes performing sensitive business transactions, often requiring some level of confidentiality. Due to size, weight, power and complexity constraints many of these nodes will have limited processing capabilities.
Well established frameworks such as low probability of intercept, including spread spectrum techniques, frequency agile systems, will protect against detection and intercept, however processing gain needs to be non-trivial and from an information theoretic perspective these frameworks have low symbol capacity. Additionally, brute force encryption methods such as HAIPE or IPSEC increases latency and decreases useful bit density within packets transmitted. These higher layer techniques do nothing against detection and physical layer denial of service attacks. Traditional RF waveform tunneling technologies are not capable of simultaneously carrying information symbols at different levels of security within the same burst or instantaneous bandwidth while also greatly reducing RF interception of the physical information symbols.